1. Part II: Respond to this passage in terms of course themes and last night’s reading. Try to focus on specific details.
Into the doors and into the soft lights I go, silently, past the rows of puritanical benches straight and torturous, finding that to which am I assigned and bending my body to its agony. There at the head of the platform with its pulpit and rail of polished brass are the banked and pyramided heads of the student choir, and stolid above uniforms of black and white; and above them, stretching to the ceiling, the organ pipes looming, a gothic hierarchy of dull gilded gold (110).

2. Today Arc of chapters 1-6 in terms of larger novel
How does Berber’s speech reinforce the Chapel and how does the Chapel reinforce his speech?
Elements of chapel
Elements of speech
How the two work together
Folk wisdom and Susie Gersham

3. Ellison, interview, The Paris Review, 1955
Narrator progresses through the book (though in a spiral, not in a straightforward way)
Ellison, interview, The Paris Review, 1955
novel is about “a struggle through illusion to reality. Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social role he is to play as defined for him by others. But all say essentially the same thing 'Keep this n____ boy running.' Before he could have some voice in his own destiny he had to discard these old identities and illusions; his enlightenment couldn't come until then” (Essays 219).
Myka Tucker Abramson “Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Housing Act of 1949”:
“Invisible Man is structured around, and generated by, the endless propagation of plans that serve to dispossess and repossess the strikingly naive protagonist”

4. Narrator’s path towards wisdom in the first six chapters.
Hotel
Slave Quarters
Golden Day
Campus
Battle Royal
Scholarship
“white folks at home”
Scholarship = route to pleasing these men
Trueblood scene—narrator encounters opposite of what he believed—Trueblood rewarded for bad not good behavior.
Golden Day—everything seems upended momentarily and narrator hears truth from doctor re: Mr. Norton
“To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less -- a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force –”
Revelation that Bledsoe lies to white people.
Narrator punished for trying to please Mr. Norton
= in tension with speech about Founder
Bledsoe cutting off narrator ends the arc of this part of the book.

5. Chapel and Barbee speech What are the keywords here
Chapel and Barbee speech What are the keywords here? What is the passage’s theme?
“And here, sitting rigid, I remember the evenings spent before the sweeping platform in awe and in pleasure, and in the pleasure of awe; remember the short formal sermons intoned from the pulpit there, rendered in smooth articulate tones, with calm assurance purged of that wild emotion of the crude preachers most of us knew in our home towns and of whom we were deeply ashamed, these logical appeals which reached us more like the thrust of a firm and formal design requiring nothing more than the lucidity of uncluttered periods, the lulling movement of multisyllabic words to thrill and console us” (111).

7. Let’s begin by looking at the description of Dr. Bledsoe on page 115
How does the narrator describe him? Thinking about its physical arrangement, why is the chapel a suitable place for him?
Photos of Tuskegee Chapel as Ellison would have seen it

8. Look at
What keywords would you use to describe what happens in Barbee’s speech? What seems to be the intent of the speech—how is it supposed to function for the campus? What story is Barbee trying to tell about the campus?

9. Now, relate Barbee’s speech to the chapel as space.

10. Last time, we noted that Ellison sees value in the folk wisdom of African Americans. What, then, does he indicate about Susie Gresham?
you, relic of slavery whom the campus loved but did not understand, aged, of slavery, yet bearer of something warm and vital and all-enduring, of which in that island of shame we were not ashamed (114)
Bledsoe
Mr. Norton
Alignment with white identity and money
Business
What the narrator knows now
But—forward-looking, modern
Susie Gresham
Folk wisdom
Experience learned over years
Slavery
What the narrator needs to learn
But—traditional, may insufficiently critique white domination